A questioning partner for design students. Name the edge you're trying to sharpen and the stone asks back, grounded in the real tensions of your discipline — or bring an idea to pressure-test, and it questions that, pointing to where the text quietly decided for you. It never hands you the answer; the thinking stays yours.
The name doubles zeti, from the Greek zetetic — "proceeding by inquiry" — with an echo of the Sanskrit neti neti, "not this, not this". What the two voices are →
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Each enquiry is a thread you open and return to. The stone questions; you keep the edge. Fork a thread to take it in a new direction without losing the original.
Progress here is not a score. It's the edge getting sharper — how many times you re-drew each goal, and the line from vague to sharp. Private to you.
zetizeti is a whetstone. A whetstone does not cut for you; it is the stone you draw your own edge against. It asks; it does not answer. It has two voices — one sharpens an edge, the other pushes back on an idea; both ask questions in your own words, and neither hands you a conclusion.
You name an edge — what you are trying to do, and where it resists you. The stone asks back, each question grounded in a real, unresolved tension of your discipline. It does not resolve the tension for you; it keeps you in the question long enough to think. This is the older harm it was built against: the answer dropped in too soon, before you have done the thinking that would make it yours. An information gap a sentence can close; an understanding gap only your own movement can close. The stone refuses to close the second one for you.
Bring an idea you want to pressure-test — a conclusion you reached in an enquiry, an answer a machine handed you, a claim you found anywhere — and paste it in. The stone questions that text instead of you. A settled idea, wherever it came from, is a conclusion already sitting in your understanding; the question worth asking is whether you reached it, or it was simply deposited there. So the stone does to the text what it does to your own premature certainty — it locates the spots where the text quietly decided something for you (called a thing "intuitive", "best practice", "obviously" — a judgement worn as a description) and asks you about those spots.
What this voice wants. Not to tell you the idea is wrong. It never grades the text, never marks it right or wrong — that would only be a second deposited verdict, this time the tool's. It wants to give you back the act of judging. It locates; you decide. It is the neti neti of the name turned outward — "not this, not this" — subtracting the text's smuggled certainties until what is left is yours to weigh.
Saved, but never aggregated. Each critique is kept, so you can return to it — like your enquiries. But it is never scored, ranked, averaged, or compared against your others, and never rolled into any leaderboard or profile. Each stands alone. That line — keep the individual reading, refuse the aggregate — is the one the split-ratio practice this borrows from cares about most: a reading is a self-frame, never a benchmark. So you get a history without the tally that would quietly turn examining a text into a metric.
When you paste a text in, nothing about it is decided by a model. It is first broken into segments, and each segment is tagged by plain, stated rules — is this describing, or is it quietly deciding? A value worn as a property (the clean interface), a directive (you should…), a verdict relayed as settled (obviously, best practice) — each is caught by a rule about grammar and a short list of words, not by anything trained on the open web. A second step, also only arithmetic, settles which of those spots the question will point at. Only then does the model arrive, and only to do one thing: phrase a single question about that one spot, in the text's own words. A last check confirms what comes back is still a question, and carries no verdict of its own.
This is deliberate, and it has three consequences worth naming plainly. The reading cannot fail — there is no model call to time out or hallucinate; the worst case is that a spot reads as neutral. It is reproducible — the same text yields the same spots every time, not a different mood on a different day. And it is inspectable — every spot it marks carries the reason it was marked, down to the exact word and the rule that caught it. You can ask the tool why, and get an answer you could check by hand.
Its blind spots are a list, not a mystery. What the tool treats as a deciding word is a short, readable list — not weights you must take on trust. It is deliberately blunt: it would rather miss a smuggled verdict than invent one where there is none. And when it does miss — and it will — the fix is a line added to that list, something you can see and argue with, not a retraining no one can audit. The model does the language; the rules do the locating; you do the judging. Where another tool asks you to trust what it cannot show you, this one shows you how little it is deciding.
The second voice is not a looser version of the first — it is the same discipline, held tighter. Both speak in questions and nothing else. Both reuse your exact words rather than paraphrasing them. Neither explains, advises, reassures, concludes, or scores. There are no grades here, no leaderboards, no percent-complete — only the edge getting sharper, which is private to you. It asks the questions; you do the thinking — whether the premature answer came from you, or from a machine.
All of this is open and checkable — the code, the corpus, the locating rules, and the full verification records (citation ledgers, adversarial passes, sign-off sheets): github.com/zetizeti/zetizeti (AGPL-3.0). Nothing here asks to be trusted; it asks to be read.
Bring an idea you want to pressure-test — a conclusion you reached in an enquiry, an answer a machine gave you, a claim from anywhere — and the stone questions the text: pointing to where it quietly decided something, where a judgement was slipped in as fact. It never grades it, never says "this is wrong": it locates, you judge. Each critique is saved to your list and you can return to it — but it is never scored, ranked, or compared against your others. Each stands alone.
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